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In the low light of the main-floor gallery that houses Peter Paul Rubens’ Massacre of the Innocents, maybe the Art Gallery of Ontario’s signature piece, Matthew Teitelbaum emerges from the shadows with an unassuming ease.

The space, with its focused glow on the painting — an acknowledged masterpiece by an exalted Dutch master that came home to the gallery in 2008 — has the sense of an altar, a holy place, but for Teitelbaum, it’s as comfortable as his living room.

Twenty-two years in one place can have that effect. Teitelbaum, 59, has been at the AGO since 1993, first as its chief curator, and since 1998 as its director. This month, that changes: Teitelbaum leaves his post. And though he’s trying not to show it, he’s not going easy.

He catches himself more than once, talking about the museum’s future plans. He says “we,” not “they,” like he doesn’t quite believe it himself.

“I’ve been talking to the board about maybe doing it on weekends,” he jokes, maybe partly entertaining the thought. “Those Porter flights are pretty convenient, you know.”

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Where he would be jetting in from (and make no mistake — he won’t) is Boston, where he accepted the directorship of its Museum of Fine Arts in April.On June 26, he’ll turn in his key card here and be gone for good.

What he leaves behind is a checklist of accomplishments enviable to almost any museum director, anywhere. Under Teitelbaum, the AGO’s membership has more than tripled, from around 32,000 in 1998 to just north of 100,000 this year. Attendance, meanwhile, has jumped in the same period from 450,000 to 790,000, with revenue reaching $63 million this year, from $26 million 17 years before.

The collection, too, is nothing like what it was: Kenneth Thomson, the museum’s angel patron, bestowed on the museum more than 2,000 pieces in 2002, which included more than 300 paintings by the Group of Seven that, for good or ill, define the museum’s 80,000-strong collection.

Equal to all of that is the rejuvenated building itself, the sprawling, gestural masterpiece designed by Frank Gehry, who Teitelbaum courted to craft a 21st-century AGO as bold as its directors’ plans.

It’s a mark not only of the director’s keen managerial acumen — he delivered the $276 million renovation on time and on budget, a sharp contrast to the Royal Ontario Museum’s renewal, still left with a hangover of reneged donor pledges and persistent aesthetic complaints — but the easy charm he exudes that brings those outside the gallery’s walls into his world view.

“It’s one of the reasons I came to the AGO,” says Elizabeth Smith, who Teitelbaum brought in from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Chicago to lead his curatorial team in 2010. “He was very invested in the institution, but he was open to dramatic movement. He seduced me with that.”

Teitelbaum leaves a museum that is healthy, dynamic and more in tune with the city in which it operates than maybe any time in its history.

“They need to hire a director that wants to put his or her mark on the institution,” Teitelbaum says. “But a new director here, I would posit, should build on the foundations of an institution that is going in a certain direction.”

If he sounds protective, it’s hard to fault him. Teitelbaum was born in Toronto, grew up in a household of artists, and has raised his own family here, too, so his investment is more than professional.

“I’m the director of a major North American museum whose institution is closest to the hospital in which he was born,” he smiles. “Mt. Sinai: three blocks.”

Then he turns serious. “There’s something to your hometown museum — you fight for it in a certain way. You remember some of the wonder you felt as a kid. You want to recreate that moment.”

In recent years, the museum has found its stride, balancing blockbuster shows necessary for the bottom line with a renewed connection to the city. Big-ticket shows have had heft along with profile: Abstract Expressionist New York, borrowed from the Museum of Modern Art, was equal parts spectacle and a contemplative marvel bordering on the spiritual; a sprawling Picasso exhibition that filled even the new and improved AGO to near-bursting, was as thorough a view of the Modern master as North America has ever seen.

“He’ll be hard to replace, because you can’t imagine someone with the international clout he has who’s so dug into the community,” says Jay Smith, a former board member and friend of Teitelbaum who has worked with him on numerous acquisitions for the AGO. “He’s profoundly changed the institution.”

In the undergrowth, the AGO has taken to heart a commitment that was often heard, but rarely seen, to the art community just outside its doors. Recent years have seen survey shows of Toronto artists like General Idea, Suzy Lake, Michael Snow, Shary Boyle and Kim Adams. Stephen Andrews, a much-loved painter here, occupies the gallery’s entire fifth floor right now.

“The common pattern is for directors to leave upon completion of a successful expansion program. Matthew stayed the course,” says Jessica Bradley, a prominent art dealer in Toronto and a former senior curator at the AGO under Teitelbaum. The director’s devotion to freshening the museum’s curatorial leadership in recent years and digging deep to produce as many exhibitions as it imports, she says, “including solo shows of senior Canadian artists, has revitalized the AGO.”

Museum-going has changed radically since he took over, and Teitelbaum hasn’t been afraid to roll the dice.

TakeArt As Therapy, last year’s collaboration with British pop philosopher Alain de Botton. It was a cringe-inducing affair that coached viewers into readings of artworks with cloying wall texts that seemed lifted from self-help guides.

“Some said that we were making the museum into a playground, but my view is, we have to experiment because otherwise we’ll never know,” Teitelbaum says. “And,” he adds, “it started a lot of conversations among the staff: Why we didn’t like it, what we would do differently if we had to do it again. Those are good conversations to have.”

Teitelbaum is quick to deflect accolades and share credit on any point from large to small.

“I was a custodian of a process,” he shrugs, when asked about the Rubens, a $76 million (U.S.) gift from Thomson, which he helped shepherd to the museum’s collection in 2002. (It stayed in London, where it was acquired, until the new building opened in 2008.)

But the director’s thirst for renewal hasn’t been without its pains.

Teitelbaum’s senior curatorial staff is nearly all new in the past few years, but came at the expense of predecessors like Dennis Reid. Reid, a towering figure in Canadian art scholarship and a virtual encyclopedia, was close with Ken Thomson and was a key figure in securing his various gifts. He was asked to retire, against his will, in 2010.

And shortly out of the gate, the new AGO stumbled: It was 2009, a year after reopening, and in the wake of an economic downturn, the museum reached for a sure-fire ticket seller as its grand-gesture marquee offering: King Tut: The Golden King and the Great Pharoahs, a head-scratcher of an exhibition prepackaged and unboxed from an international corporation, AEG, and hived off inside the museum, disconnected from its greater whole.

The show did its work, selling 400,000 tickets, but for many, it was a deflating step along what was billed to be a whole new path, where the city and its various communities — art and otherwise — would see itself reflected in the brand-new AGO’s shimmering hide. The city felt it acutely, but perhaps no one more than Teitelbaum.

But he didn’t wallow; he learned. Elizabeth Smith, who has since left to direct the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation in New York, came to the AGO after Tut’s run in 2010. Its lingering presence had become a guide.

“When I arrived, people were talking about it as maybe not the best thing to have happened there, and there was a real urge to address that,” she said. “They were looking to solidify their programming, and Matthew was very focused on what the institution wanted to be, and how it would be more sensitive to the community.”

In the years that followed, the director broadened his conversations, reaching out as often as in. Like many others, I was occasionally invited to the museum’s inner sanctum for tea and a chat, usually when something had been pointed out in public as puzzling or wrong-headed.

“He’s grown dramatically — he’s become very inclusive,” Jay Smith says. “He’s a great listener — it’s never his way or the highway. He’s willing to listen to ideas, share the credit and adopt those ideas for his own.”

It’s fitting, then, that the director’s swan song was Basquiat: Now is the Time, the recently closed survey of the big-name African-American painter whose death at 27, from a heroin overdose, has always threatened to subsume his work.

Organized by the AGO, it’s one of the things of which Teitelbaum is most proud — and given Basquiat’s charged take on racial politics, amid the furor surrounding the carding debate gripping the city, among the most relevant.

“Here was an African American artist from New York who died in the ’80s — why in Toronto, and why now? Matthew really pushed us on that,” says Judith Koke, the AGO’s head of public programming and learning. Teitelbaum convened an advisory board of leaders from Toronto’s black community for frequent consultation.

“They said some things that weren’t easy to hear: ‘Is this a one-off? Why have you never asked us before?’ Matthew was really open to hearing that, and asking how we could move forward together.”

In the end, Teitelbaum’s legacy is not the building, or even the objects with which it is filled, but the people who come to see it. Every change, every staff shuffle, every pause and turn in every floor and every gallery is geared to it. “When people arrive, we need them to know we want them here, whoever they are,” he says.

Today, Teitelbaum says, is strange. “Looking back never really interested me,” he says. “But my challenge, and I might even say something I’ve left behind, is that I didn’t succeed in getting truly a big enough audience. I didn’t. And that’s because I feel it deserves more, but I’m tough on myself,” he says.

A pause in the Canadian galleries, where a pair of Tom Thomson’s most iconic paintings, The West Wind and The Jack Pine, hang side by side; nearby, Andrew Hunter, Teitelbaum’s Canadian curator appointee, has placed a visceral, eerily gorgeous sculpture by the First Nations artist Michael Belmore, of a fawn mangled as roadkill. “It’s stunning, isn’t it?” He says. “It opens up the meaning of all these works. That’s the kind of thing that gets me out of bed in the morning.”

Close by hangs a huge work by Paterson Ewen, a favourite painter from London, Ont., who Teitelbaum championed, as curator, two decades before. The long road, from there to here, ends now.

“I hope that’s how people have seen me — as a constant learner,” he says. “I’m not ready to go — not at all. But that’s the best time to leave, isn’t it?”

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